Nor have American orators found the path to success less difficult. Rufus Choate--who was, perhaps, the most accomplished advocate America has yet produced--was a noble illustration of what systematic culture and discipline can do. He was, in the truest sense of the term, a made orator. Forensic rhetoric was the great study of his life, and he pursued it with a patience, a steadiness, a zeal, equal to that of Chatham or Curran. He trusted to no native gift of eloquence, but practised elocution every day for forty years as a critical study. Everything that could be prepared, was prepared; every nerve, every muscle, that could be trained was trained; every power that daily practise could strengthen was invigorated. So thoroughly imbued was he with a zeal for oratory, that it formed the subject of his almost daily conversation, as it did of his daily practise; and his biography will rouse an ambitious student as the sound of the trumpet does the war-horse.
Daniel Webster may, perhaps, be considered to have been as nearly a _natural_ orator as any this country has produced; and yet the students are few indeed that cultivate the art of oratory so laboriously as he did. Even his genius was mainly "science in disguise." He himself told the late Senator Fessenden that those figures and illustrations in his speeches, which had become so famous and been so often quoted, were, like Sheridan's wit, the result of previous study and preparation; and that that passage in his speech, wherein he describes the glory and the power of England--a passage known and quoted the world over--was conceived and fashioned while he was standing on the American side of the Niagara River, listening to the British drum-beats on the Canada shore.
From these examples we may learn that all truly noble orators in every age have trusted, not to inspiration, but to discipline; that great as were their natural abilities, they were much less than the ignorant rated them; that even the mightiest condescended to certain rules and methods of study by which the humblest are able to profit. It is good for the student to read of the studies and labors, the trials and conflicts, the difficulties and triumphs, of such men. It is to the ambitious student as the touch of mother earth was to Antæus in his struggle with Hercules--renewing his strength and reviving his flagging zeal. It rouses him to severer self-denial, to more assiduous study, to more self-sustaining confidence, and leads him to feel, like Themistocles of old, that "the trophies of Miltiades will not let me sleep." These examples will teach him that God has set a price on every real and noble achievement; that success in oratory, as in everything else worth succeeding in, can be purchased only by pain and labor; and lastly and mainly, that those who would follow in their steps must give their days and nights to study, and emulate their greatness by emulating their love of labor.